Category Archives: The Ugly American

The Quiet American serves up a classic love triangle amid political treachery in Saigon. A jaded English journalist and a youthful American economic aid officer fall in love with the same woman, the willowy, amber-skinned Phuong, an embodiment of the eternal beauty and mystery of Vietnam.

It’s also a political novel, spiked with philosophical and ideological dilemma. Should men of conscience stand up to America’s intervention alongside France in opposition to Vietnam’s struggle for self-rule? Should America use its massive might to instill wide-eyed Western idealism and liberal individualism in a country that’s never known democracy? In the short term, should Washington support the tactics of torture and terrorism employed by murderous Vietnamese allies? In the long term, is it better to enter a prolonged war that will cause unimaginable suffering, or allow Vietnamese nationalists to establish a Communist regime?

Thomas Fowler, the story’s narrator, is a red-faced, middle-aged reporter who finds refuge in his quiet romance, his opium pipes and his sense of dégagé, being uninvolved. Only when Fowler discovers that an earnest young American has stolen away his mistress does he re-engage in events. Alden Pyle’s personality and C.I.A.-scented activism stoke Fowler’s hatred of Americans in Southeast Asia. He says, “I was tired of the whole pack of them, with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals, and their too-wide cars and their not quite latest guns,” he says. At another point he haughtily derides “the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics (and) the beastliness of American children.”

Fowler disses Pyle for his idealism and lack of real-world experience: “He was young and silly and ignorant and he got involved.” He mocks Pyle’s typical American preoccupation with “mental ideas,” including “-isms and -ocracies.” Adding fuel to the fire, Fowler learns that Pyle has thrown in his lot, and America’s, with a despotic general who leads a Third Force against both the beleaguered French and the advancing Communists. He sees Pyle as complicit in a terrorist bombing that kills and cripples civilians in the square opposite the Continental Hotel. Fowler is ruthless yet he’s shocked when Pyle defends the murder of women and children as a tool to effect positive political change. Worse yet, the reporter susses out that Pyle is importing plastic of the sort terrorists can mold into bicycle bombs.

Alden Pyle is a fine example of an American whose innocence and good intentions bring tragic consequences. Greene has granted the quiet American a few good qualities. He is Boston-bred and Harvard-educated, exceedingly polite and highly scrupled; he doesn’t drink, or smoke opium, and he has the decency to tell Fowler face-to-face that he plans to marry Phuong. In fact, he earnestly asks Fowler to translate his troth. And it is Pyle who gallantly risks his own life to save Fowler from dying under fire in a rice paddy. Pyle says he did it for Phuong. Fowler retorts that he would not do the same for Pyle, and apparently he means it.

In what could be an allegory for the way Western powers regard Vietnam, Phuong’s pair of suitors discuss Love Saigon Style. Pyle tells Fowler that Phuong can’t possibly love him because he lies to her. Fowler admits he lies because he wants to keep her. The Englishman tells his American adversary: “Love’s a Western word. We use it for sentimental reasons or to cover up an obsession with one woman.” Asians are too practical to suffer from obsessions, he asserts. Pyle says he wants to give Phuong “a decent life” in America, which Fowler paints as a deep freezer, a car of her own, the latest model TV and supermarkets that sell celery wrapped in cellophane. Fowler says his live-in lover is quite capable of deciding for herself. “She’s tougher than you’ll ever be,” he says. “She can survive a dozen of us.”

Greene’s novel is positively brilliant with conversation that cuts like a diamond. If you read only one of the books on the Ugly American bookshelf, read this one.

Hustle the East is a new novel that tells a touching story of love and loss while touching all bases of Ugly Americanness. Three narrators trace the tragic history of Laos as a pawn in the Cold War, shedding light on America’s immoral and inhumane bombing campaign.

In what the author calls “faux memoirs,” we witness the turbulent downfall of a centuries-old monarchy through the eyes of an American teacher and two Laotians of starkly different backgrounds. The future of the Kingdom of Laos and the lives of the narrators come under the shadow of reckless Americans back when America thought it was invincible. The repercussions of what happened in the Seventies last for decades, into the new Millennium.

The American narrator Paul “Benny” Bendit is a straight-arrow straight out of college in Illinois. As a newbie, he naively imagines he can help erase the image of the Ugly American in Southeast Asia. On his first day in Laos, Bendit glimpses Henry Kissinger on a historic peace mission that has dark implications for the 600-year-old Kingdom. Bendit also meets Jack Gaines, a feckless fellow teacher who’s siphoning money out of hopeless situations. From the get-go, Bendit marks Gaines as a charlatan. But seen through other eyes, Gaines is a complex con artist, a loathsome and lovable bad guy. In retrospect, Bendit recalls: “… It took me a while to figure out that in Laos the good guys were the bad guys.”

The second narrator is an orphan of colonialism who became a monk and a gravedigger. Sangkhom notes wryly that he and Gaines were born on opposite sides of the world and they started out on opposite side of the war. When East twains with West, their fates become entwined — but only as far as the next plot twist.

In the opinion of the third narrator, the enigmatic Lao ingénue Chansamone, Gaines is like a centipede: “The first two legs don’t tell the whole story.” A complicated love triangle arises out of chaos but the course of love doesn’t run true in a country on the verge of collapse.

Borrowing pages from The Ugly American, this new novel is like a Who’s Who of (Fictional) Americans Mucking About in Southeast Asia. Apart from Bendit and Gaines, we meet half a dozen Americans attempting to influence history or hustle the East. Tommy Mangold was a helicopter pilot and bona fide war hero in Vietnam before giving up his Air Force wings to work as a civilian in Laos. As an aid worker, he worked behind the scenes and below the radar to defend democracy in Asia. On the day Kissinger comes to Vientiane, Mangold curses all he’s done in the name of the democracy, and does a 180.

Mohawk Jones was born to missionaries in the mountains that merge northern Thailand with Laos. His knowledge of highlands culture and languages made him invaluable to America’s efforts to win the hearts and minds and military service of the Hmong and other mountain dwellers. Recruited by the C.I.A., Jones abandons the Gospel and trains the highlanders to kill for Freedom and Uncle Sam.

Ernest Leitner is a widower who landed in Laos after selling his farm. If he wasn’t so short, Leitner could have stood in for the pitchfork-wielding Iowa farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Obviously patterned after one of the good guys in The Ugly American, Leitner is an agricultural adviser who’s spending his life savings to lift Hmong farmers out of poverty. A saint among the scoundrels sent by USAID, Letiner makes personal sacrifices to improve the lives of Laotians displaced by bombs.

Warren Rippington delivers the milk and hard rice (ammo) for the C.I.A.’s Air America. The fearless mercenary pilot admires President Nixon’s anti-Communist gumption. But when the course of history takes a wrong turn, even a gung-ho guy like Rippington can shed a tear. Unbelievably it’s not the Communists but Congress that brings Humpty Dumpty down.

Stanford Oh is a Korean-American Vietnam War veteran who serves as a Consular Affairs Officer for the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane. When a fellow American is arrested by Lao Communists, Consul Oh advises him to confess to everything. In a newly Communist country, the diplomat doesn’t know if it’s worse for an American to be charged with murder, espionage or anti-social behavior.

The author rejected the standard Disclosure Statement that states: “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.” That’s because the fictional sweep of Hustle The East takes place against a backdrop of actual historical events. It’s no coincidence that readers learn more about the actual persons named Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Dr. Tom Dooley and a pair of American ambassadors who directed the bombing of Laos.

Anyone who investigates the behavior of Ugly Americans in Southeast Asia (what my friend Jim calls Ugly Americanity) in fiction or fact, will stumble upon Edward Lansdale. Every major work on the C.I.A. has had to deal with Lansdale’s personality, professionalism and impact on the intelligence organization; some praising him as a Good Guy in the idealistic Kennedy mold and a genius at anti-guerrilla tactics; others deriding him as a lightweight ad man, if not a madman, who loved to gab with Asians but did not grab the complexity of their cultures. President Kennedy teased Lansdale that he was America’s James Bond but Lansdale demurred. saying he was not the 007 type.

I’ve been hearing about this larger-than-life intelligence operative psy-war guru for 50 years and now, thanks to military historian Max Boot, I know a great deal about him, about 600 pages of novelistic non-fiction about him.

Followers of the Ugly American Book Club will recall that the real-life Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, who was U.S.A.F. and C.I.A., was the model for Air Force Col. Edwin Barnum Hillandale, a hero of The Ugly American. They both played the harmonica and ate in panciterias to make friends with Filipinos. William J. Lederer, author of The Ugly American, was a friend of Lansdale’s and an unabashed admirer of the undercover agent’s uncommon approach to patriotism and quashing Communism.

Lansdale also has a connection to The Quiet American. Both he and Graham Greene lived in Saigon in 1954. When the book came out in 1956, Lansdale told his wife that Greene’s undercover intelligence agent Alden Pyle was “supposedly based upon me.” For his part Greene denied it, saying Pyle was “younger and more innocent” than Lansdale and besides the book was written before Lansdale arrived in Saigon. When he finally read the book, Lansdale complained that Greene got the politics wrong as well as his description of plastic explosives.

In 1956, Lansdale invited the Hollywood director Joseph L. Mankiewicz to his home in Saigon to discuss a film version of Greene’s best-seller. The Hollywood producer had acquired the film rights to prevent Europeans from making an “anti-U.S.” movie. The two witty conversationalists hit it off, and it was Lansdale who came up with a plot twist that made the movie anti-Communist and infuriated the English author. Boot describes the plot inversion as an example of Lansdale’s touch for psychological warfare.

In fact, Lansdale already had some experience in spinning yarns to paint the Vietnamese Communists as Evil Incarnate in the eyes of the American public. In 1954, a flotilla of U.S. Navy vessels transported tens of thousands of Catholics from North to South Vietnam in what became known as Operation Passage to Freedom. The most influential, hair-raising account of the exodus came in the form of Dr. Tom Dooley’s 1960 book, Deliver Us from Evil. The handsome young American doctor vividly describes accounts of Vietminh persecuting Catholics and using chopsticks as instruments of torture. A USIS official, who believed Vietnamese would never waste chopsticks, said he first heard the chopstick torture stories from none other than that wild and crazy psy-ops guy Lansdale.

Boot describes Lansdale as an early purveyor of fake news with a political purpose. Lansdale was very proud of “black psywar” leaflets he penned purporting to be Vietminh leadership preparing an attack on Hanoi, and instructions he distributed on how to inventory prospective war booty, and fake charts showing how U.S. atomic bombs would annihilate the North.

Though Lansdale was not present when the South Vietnamese President Ngo DInh Diem was ousted and assassinated (the turning point of Morris West’s The Ambassador), he served as an adviser to Diem during the Geneva Convention that split Vietnam in half.

Boot’s bountiful new book is a superbly researched biography of Lansdale that covers more than a century of American military intervention in Asia, beginning with the Filipino-American war. Through Lansdale’s letters and author interviews, the biographer lovingly recreates Lansdale’s family tree and the tricky relationship he had with his American wife and his Filipina mistress. But more tellingly, Boot traces Lansdale’s path from ad copywriter for Levi’s to psywar expert and nation-builder. We follow his secret exploits in the jungles of the Philippines, his friendship and mentorship of the Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay, and the brilliant unorthodox strategies he employed to undermine and eventually disarm the Huk Rebellion of Filipino Communists.

Based on his success countering insurgency in the Philippines, and despite his lack of knowledge about Cuba, Lansdale was put in charge of America’s campaign to counter Fidel Castro. Though Lansdale was one of the few C.I.A. men who opposed the Bay of Pigs invasion, he bore the brunt of blame for the Agency when the invasion failed. Before long, Lansdale was back in Vietnam.

The second half of the book sets out on the road to war in Vietnam before it steers us toward an analysis of the road not taken. Some Monday Morning armchair generals say American presidents should have authorized the use of even greater force against North Vietnam, sooner and spread wider, to nip the Communist insurgency in the bud. But what if Uncle Sam had used less force? It should have been obvious to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as it apparently was to Lansdale, that Vietnam was not a conventional battlefield that could be won by artillery and air power. What if Washington had focused its massive economic and political power on how to best serve the Vietnamese people and make them prosper? Could a lighter military hand guided by a more enlightened nation-building brain have succeeded where tons of bombs and Napalm failed?

The Ugly American is paramount in my pantheon of novels about Americans bungling about in Southeast Asia. As literature, The Ugly American is not a great novel or even a good novel. A New York Times book reviewer opined that it was “neither subtle as art nor altogether convincing as fiction.” But it touched a nerve, and half a century after its publication, the book’s title remains a catch-phrase for incompetent and insensitive U.S. diplomats, arrogant entrepreneurs, and even travelers and tourists from the States who act badly abroad.

The novel is clumsily episodic, consisting of loosely intertwined sketches. On the plus side, the authors serve up engaging descriptions of what it’s like to live and work as an American in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, some of the sketches read like a CV.

What stands out most about the American miscreants Lederer and Burdick found mucking about in Southeast Asia is their ineptitude — but that’s the whole point of the exercise.

The authors set their story in Sarkhan, a fictional Southeast Asian country “out toward Burma and Thailand.” The trouble brewing in Sarkhan serves as a snapshot of the mid-1950s when America was wading into the quagmire the French left behind in Indochina.

Perhaps the ugliest American in the book is “Lucky” Lou Sears, a three-term U.S. Senator. When Lucky Lou loses his bid for re-election, he appeals to the White House for a post-Senate sinecure. Alas there are no federal judgeships available so they offer him an ambassadorship in Sarkhan. “Where the hell’s Sarkhan?” the future envoy asks. When Lucky Lou learns that the ambassador’s mansion comes rent-free with an entertainment allowance, and diplomats can buy alcohol tax-free, he agrees to represent the United States in Sarkhan.

In stark contrast to Lucky Lou Sears, we meet another Lucky Lou, the Soviet ambassador to Sarkhan, Louis Krupitsyn. Unlike his American opposite number, Lucky Lou 2 can read and write Sarkhanese. Moscow’s man in Sarkhan spent months preparing for the assignment with conscious efforts to appeal to the local people; he lost 40 pounds; he took ballet and nose-flute lessons to better appreciate Sarkhanese music and dance; he read Sarkhanese literature and attended lessons on Buddhism. Upon his arrival in the country, he humbly presents himself, bowing low, to the Prime Minister and the Chief Abbot of Sarkhanese Buddhism. While the American ambassador gleans information from lavish cocktail parties where Asians are not invited, the Soviet ambassador gets his information from Sarkhanese drivers and translators working for the Americans.

Nearly halfway through the book, Lou Sears gets his judgeship. He is succeeded in Sarkhan by Ambassador Gilbert MacWhite, a professional Foreign Service officer. MacWhite has taken the trouble to learn a lot about the country and learn a little of the language. MacWhite considers his appointment a capstone to his career, and readily accepts the mantle of crusader against creeping Communism. He travels to the Philippines, Vietnam and Burma to learn about Communist atrocities and counter-insurgency tactics to quell the tide. Though well intentioned MacWhite makes mistakes that will cost him dearly. Meanwhile the chapters of his fact-finding tour provide entrée for the authors to fictionalize a several Americans who were well-known in Southeast Asia, among them a Cold War warrior who closely resembles the C.I.A. operative Edward Lansdale, a pioneer in psychological warfare and counter-terrorism.

A few of the heroes are unselfish technical specialists who chose to live among the people they’re there to help. In Cambodia, we meet Tom Knox, a poultry expert from Iowa, who strives to improve food security among impoverished farmers. Knox suggests to the U.S. aid mission that for very little money, he could import hens and roosters from America to strengthen the local breeding stock, and increase Cambodian annual egg production from 30 eggs per hen to 200. But enamored of big military-industrial type development projects, Uncle Sam turns him down.

In Vietnam, we meet Homer Atkins, the Ugly American of the title. The irony is that Atkins, who describes himself as ugly, is the antipathy of the ugly actors who give Americans a bad name. Atkins prefers to live outside the capital without the creature comforts so crucial to top American officials. Atkins is a doer. He’s not comfortable taking meetings with misguided U.S. officials. Rather than look them in the eye, he looks down at his thick-veined, liver spot-freckled, grease-stained hands. His hands remind him he’s an ugly man but Atkins takes courage knowing he can always earn a good living with his ugly hands.

Atkins is a self-made millionaire who felt a calling to help people in developing Asia. He travels around Vietnam, talking to all kinds of people, and assessing the need for the dams and military roads the Americans are advocating. In his final report, Atkins tells the American aid apparatus that the Vietnamese people don’t need roads designed for tanks; they need the building blocks of development, like quarries and brick factories. Scorned in Saigon, the Ugly American is invited to Sarkhan, where Ambassador MacWhite challenges him to build sustainable water systems in the boonies, an assignment Atkins relishes. (Atkins plays a major role as a highway engineer in the movie version of “The Ugly American” as discussed below.)

Join the Club

Published 60 years ago, The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick remains paramount in the pantheon of novels about Americans bungling about in Southeast Asia. The book touched a nerve, and half a century later, its title remains a catch-phrase for incompetent and insensitive U.S. diplomats, arrogant entrepreneurs, and even travelers and tourists from the States who act badly abroad. Nearly all of the books and films discussed here are reflections on the Ugly American theme.

We’re focused on American characters, primarily fictional characters, mucking about in Southeast Asia during the Cold War, Vietnam War era and the new Millennium.

Spoiler alert: Many of the characters you’ll meet here are seriously flawed or downright evil, deserving of the appellation Ugly American. It seems that whenever America is striving to reclaim its dignity in the world, someone comes along to poison the reputation of good-natured, well intentioned Americans everywhere. President Trump, if you’re listening, pay attention.